Rise to Greatness (37 page)

Slidell had a final card to play. The South was tired of waiting for England and France, with all their ancient grudges and competing interests, to fashion a joint intervention, so Richmond had recently given its emissary an unusual instruction: offer a bribe. Now Slidell smoothly told the emperor that the French determination to install a puppet regime in Mexico—a move stoutly resisted by the Lincoln administration—made this the perfect time for France to ally itself with the Confederacy. A Southern victory would make Mexico safe for France. To encourage Napoleon’s active support, the South was prepared to pay France a hundred thousand bales of cotton, worth more than $12 million. What was more, Richmond would provide duty-free access to Southern markets for all the French cargo that could be packed into the ships sent to collect that cotton. By the estimate of Judah Benjamin, the Confederate secretary of state, the bribe could not possibly be worth less than a hundred million French francs.

The emperor registered, but did not react to, this irregular proposal, and after more than an hour of conversation the meeting ended amiably. Napoleon repeated that he hoped to hear from England, yet he also managed to leave Slidell with the feeling that he was moving toward a decision to act alone if necessary.

*   *   *

On July 15, as Congress prepared to adjourn, Lincoln sent messages to the House and Senate asking that the lawmakers delay their departure another day. Word somehow circulated that the president was preparing to veto the Confiscation Act. (Indirect communication was a Lincoln specialty; one irritated congressman complained of his “back-kitchen way of doing this business.”) Lincoln’s complaint was that the legislation could be construed as punishing a certain class of people without benefit of a trial—making it an unconstitutional “bill of attainder.” This was a flaw too obvious for Chief Justice Taney and the Supreme Court to miss.

Congressional leaders quickly drafted a resolution clarifying Trumbull’s bill. Lincoln went to the Capitol to be on hand for any last-minute questions or negotiations. When the resolution passed easily, Lincoln signed the bill—“an act to destroy slavery,” in the words of Nicolay and Hay. As a precaution, the president attached his lightly revised veto message, so that his interpretation of the new law would be public record. He also approved changes to the Militia Act of 1795, authorizing the enlistment of blacks in the military. And with those two dramatic actions, the momentous second session of the 37th Congress of the United States came to a close.

In the span of less than eight months, this tempestuous Congress had written the future of the nation. It wrenched American history away from the dead end of slavery and toward the hard, slow course of freedom; it created a modern monetary and fiscal machinery; it established a first-class army and navy; and it opened the frontier to bootstrapping families and supported their toil with a federal Bureau of Agriculture.

The Congress of 1862 also passed legislation that provided the means for establishing a rail link from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The transcontinental railroad’s odyssey through Capitol Hill was an unseemly business involving millions of dollars in bribes, for some of the greatest fortunes in American history were at stake. Disputes over the cost and the final route nearly killed the bill in the Senate, but the president had kept the lawmakers moving forward.

As a student of geography and a former railroad lawyer, he was well versed in the subject of possible paths west. Lincoln had arrived in Washington believing that the railroad ought to follow the easy route along the Platte River valley through Nebraska and what became Wyoming. As president, he came to realize that the most plausible proposal for the difficult western end of the line called for crossing the rugged Sierra Nevada at the Donner Pass. With these understandings he became, in the words of one historian, “the greatest friend of the Pacific Railroad … exhorting [men of] Congress and business to do their parts.” Lincoln signed the law authorizing the immense undertaking on July 1, 1862.

Perhaps most visionary of all, the 37th Congress provided for the world’s foremost system of widely available college education. Lincoln believed “that the very best, firmest, and most enduring basis of our republic was education, the thorough and universal education of the American people.” In signing Justin Morrill’s bill to use federal lands to endow state colleges and universities for the education of the farming and working classes, Lincoln endorsed the transformation of American society and unleashed a mighty engine of economic development. Some of the finest universities in the world—among them Cornell, the University of California–Berkeley, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison, to say nothing of dozens more—grew out of that bill, with the result that many millions of Americans and students from around the globe would never have to say, as Lincoln did: “That is what I have always regretted—the want of a college education. Those who have it should thank God for it.”

After Congress adjourned, Charles Sumner offered an understated assessment: “Our session has been busy.” Then he added, with justified pride: “I doubt if any legislative body ever acted on so many important questions.” Nicolay, who had been Lincoln’s often irritable gatekeeper through the hectic months of congressional activity, sighed with relief. “I am heartily glad that Congress is at last gone,” he wrote, “and am sure I shall enjoy the relief from the constant strain of petty cares and troubles which their presence imposes.” And yet, he added: “It has done well, and much more than could reasonably have been expected of it—certainly much more than any former Congress has done.”

*   *   *

The press of work had forced Lincoln to borrow a third secretary, this one from the Interior Department. William O. Stoddard was an amiable young newspaper editor from Illinois whose chief virtue was his ability to get along with Mary Lincoln. Among the tasks he took on was keeping track of all the inventions and prototypes pushed on the president by would-be arms dealers. “Every proposed vender of condemned European firelocks was possessed by the idea that he might make a sale of them if he could induce the President to overrule the decisions of the Bureau of Ordnance,” Stoddard recalled. The various weapons would accumulate in the White House until there was a stack of promising candidates. Then Lincoln and “Stodd” would go test fire them. At that time, the Mall was an overgrown expanse—in Stoddard’s words, “badly littered with rubbish”—and “in the middle of it was a huge pile of old building lumber.” Placing a target on the woodpile, the men backed up a respectable distance and started shooting.

Lincoln was fascinated by innovation. He loved visiting the navy yard to observe Dahlgren’s tests of new artillery, and under the tutelage of Joseph Henry at the Smithsonian Institution he kept abreast of scientific and medical advances. That summer, the president was also personally sponsoring a series of top-secret chemical experiments intended to improve the formula for gunpowder. The year 1862 was a time of tremendous technological progress—of innovations ranging from the mass production of condensed milk in cans to the first underwater ships, called “submarines.” The nightmares of generations yet unborn made their first ominous appearances: a schoolteacher in New York, John Doughty, wrote Stanton to explain how artillery shells could be loaded with chlorine gas to force the enemy from their trenches, while an inventor named Richard Gatling opened the first machine-gun factory.

A more welcome breakthrough came at the Gilbert & Bennett factory in Georgetown, Connecticut, begun as a horsehide tannery in the early 1800s. Perplexed by the waste of hair stripped from hides, Benjamin Gilbert soon branched into the business of stuffing horsehair mattresses and seat cushions. Then he began weaving the hair into fine mesh to make sieves. As technology advanced and slender metal wire became widely available, Gilbert’s company developed longer-lasting wire-cloth sieves. When the war broke out and Gilbert & Bennett was suddenly unable to sell sieves in the South, the company found itself with piles of surplus metal mesh—until one clever employee thought to paint the stuff, stretch it on frames, and thus create the durable window screen.

This invention had yet to reach Washington in July 1862, where it was sorely needed. “The gas lights over my desk are burning brightly and the windows of the room are open, and all bugdom outside seems to have organized a storming party to take the gas light, in numbers which seem to exceed the contending hosts at Richmond,” Nicolay wrote from the White House on the sultry night of July 20. “The air is swarming with them, they are on the ceiling, the walls and the furniture in countless numbers, they are buzzing about the room, and butting their heads against the window panes, they are on my clothes, in my hair, and on the sheet I am writing on.”

It was to escape that buggy misery that the Lincolns had moved to the cottage at the Soldiers’ Home, where Mary found her new surroundings both therapeutic and depressing. “The drives and walks around here are delightful,” she wrote, and “each day brings its visitors.” But she couldn’t gaze on the lawns and pathways without thinking of “our idolised boy,” who would have had so much fun playing with Tad “in this sweet spot.” Writing to a friend, she confessed that the memories of Willie and the anguish of knowing that “
he is not with us
 … oftentimes for days overcomes me.”

To make matters worse, Bob, visiting from Harvard, announced that he wanted to join the army. He had been thinking hard about the matter since returning to school after Willie’s funeral; in March he had bought a book called
Cadet Life at West Point
. His father’s call for more troops undoubtedly fueled his desire, because Lincoln’s critics weren’t shy about suggesting that the president’s own able-bodied son should step to the head of the line. But Mary would not hear of it: “We have lost one son, and his loss is as much as I can bear.”

Lincoln had good reason to worry about his wife, for she remained extremely fragile. A newspaper reporter called on her at the cottage that summer and was shocked when she “burst into a passion of tears … she could neither think nor talk of anything but Willie.” Lincoln approved of his son’s soldierly ambitions, but to keep the peace with Mary and bolster her shaky recovery, Lincoln supported her decision to forbid Bob to enlist.

Because this family crisis took place in the midst of the greater calamities, Lincoln had little time to discuss the matter with his son. Young Tad’s needs were easy to meet: a hug, a lap, a toy. What Bob required, his father could not give. “Any great intimacy between us became impossible,” the younger Lincoln said years later. “I scarcely ever had ten minutes’ quiet talk with him during his Presidency, on account of his constant devotion to business.”

*   *   *

Early on Monday morning, July 21, Salmon Chase was pursuing one of his favorite hobbies: gossiping about Seward. His first visitor that day was the strange and voluble Adam de Gurowski, a Polish count who wore blue-tinted glasses and, occasionally, a blue veil to match. A man of the world, fluent in several languages, the count spent his days translating foreign newspaper articles for the State Department, his nights flitting from dinner party to salon to hotel lobby, and every free minute recording his thoughts and experiences in a diary written in ink and venom.

Like most abolitionists, Gurowski blamed Seward for Lincoln’s cautious policy on slavery, so he was delighted to have some new intelligence for Chase. At dinner the previous night, Gurowski had heard Seward expounding on the virtues of a coup d’état. The other guests, many of them diplomats, “were very much disgusted,” reported the count. Chase knew Seward well enough not to take this very seriously: blustering at dinner was one of his trademarks. The secretary of state “loved to talk, was not above monopolizing the conversation,” a biographer wrote, “and had many moods, being by turns challenging, pontifical, a cynic, a raconteur, a mimic—altogether something of a show-off, and one whose words could not always be trusted.”

Chase had barely said farewell to the count when he received a note from one of Seward’s messengers announcing that the president had called a meeting of the cabinet for ten
A.M.
Chase was surprised; as he put it in his diary, “It has been so long since any consultation has been held that it struck me as a novelty.” Upon arriving at the White House, the Treasury secretary found Lincoln in a stern mood, “profoundly concerned” and “determined.”

The time had come, the president announced to his cabinet, to harden the administration’s policies on the war and the related institution of slavery. He had drafted four orders and wanted to have the reactions of those present. The first would give Union armies permission to confiscate whatever supplies they could find in the Southern regions where they camped and fought. Long supply lines, easily cut by Rebel cavalry raids, were killing the momentum of Federal forces from the Shenandoah to the Mississippi. No longer would hungry men in blue march past crops and livestock being grown to feed the rebellion; they would eat the food themselves. Not a word of dissent came from the cabinet.

Lincoln’s second order, which authorized the use of contrabands as army laborers, also met unanimous approval. Order number three attempted to protect whatever pro-Union sentiment might exist in the South: Federal commanders would be instructed to keep records of confiscated supplies and laborers so that Southerners able to prove their loyalty could be compensated for their losses. Chase had serious doubts: How practical would it be to keep scrupulous track of every bushel of corn and every slaughtered hog gathered by armies numbering in the tens of thousands? It seemed an enormous waste of effort “for the benefit of the inhabitants of rebel States,” he said. Others in the cabinet agreed.

Lincoln’s fourth order was designed to push the colonization project along. But the cabinet had no appetite for this problematic topic; the discussion quickly stalled.

Edwin Stanton got the meeting restarted with his own related agenda item. Several thousand troops had recently been withdrawn from David Hunter’s command on the Southern coast and sent to McClellan. Now Hunter was reporting that he was too weak to defend the Sea Island cotton plantations in the event that the Rebels tried to take them back. The general wanted permission to arm and train 5,000 contrabands to help him hold his position. Stanton felt the step was necessary, and both Chase and Seward agreed. This time the president was the lone dissenter. As Chase put it, Lincoln “was not prepared to decide the question.”